Spinal cord injury is a devastating injury with, today, no significantly useful therapy. Emergency medical treatment for spinal-cord injury patients has included prompt triage and intensive rehabilitation. These therapies have somewhat increased or optimized remaining neurologic functions in those patients and prevented further injury to the spinal cord. However, only a minority of patients ever achieve any major neurologic recovery. As a result, no effective acute treatment or rehabilitation therapy is presently available for the approximately 10,000 patients per year which suffer from major spinal cord injury and the consequent permanent disability.
Development of effective treatments is also made more difficult because it is difficult to extrapolate to therapy in humans from animal studies. There is significant controversy about whether any and which animal models best simulate spinal cord injuries in humans, about whether the models are reproducible, and therefore whether studies in animals provide useful information for possible human therapy. It is, therefore, one object of the present invention to provide a method for neurological recovery in humans with spinal cord injury by administration of the ganglioside GM1.
It is another object of the present invention to provide a combination therapy for the treatment of spinal cord injury comprised of administration of the ganglioside GM1 and preferably methylprednisolone.